Creating a Living Forest Simulation for my Indie Game

Lumbermill's forest simulation has always lacked saplings and older trees dying - key parts of the lifecycle. In this Unity Indie Game devlog I implement a complete forest lifecycle simulation and some other important features!
Wishlist Lumbermill: bit.ly/wishlist-lumbermill
⮞ Description ⮜
Since the beginning of this project, I've always intended for there to be a full forest lifecycle, including older trees naturally dying off and younger trees appearing on the forest fringes. For various reasons I've put that off though, but have now implemented a complete asynchronous simulation - meaning trees will constantly regenerate without hitting the game's performance. I've also added market price calculation for items, item sprites, and three new variations on a very commonly requested machine!
⮞ About BWDev ⮜
If you're new to the channel, welcome! I'm a full time Indie Game developer working in Unity 2D. Lumbermill is my main project - a management/factory builder game, which I began work on in Feb 2019. I aim to release devlogs on that project every few weeks, so keep an eye out for those!
⮞ Socials ⮜
🌲 Discord: / discord
🌲 Patreon: / bwdev
🌲 Twitter (BWDev) - / bwdev1
🌲 Twitter (Lumbermill) - / lumbermillgame
⮞ Timestamps ⮜
0:00 - Introduction
0:25 - Item Market Values
1:17 - Forest Lifecycle
3:27 - Animating Saplings
4:00 - Fixing Isometric Sorting
5:15 - Item Sprites
6:14 - Dry Kilns
8:02 - Outro
#devlog #unity #madewithunity #unity2d #indiedev #bwdev #gamedev #indiegame

[@Mecheka]

Please, add a special object called "Debug Log" for us fellow devs, as an easter egg.

[@simonixen0762]

Even us none-devs understand it, that's a great pun 😂

[@Magnogen]

YES. I am in full agreement with this.

[@spicylemonstudios1125]

This needs to make it in😅

[@redstonerelic]

could have it be one of the properties (bugged log) and you need to run it thru the Debugging Machine to get a Debugd Log

[@baryhobal]

And of course the famous "Dev Log"

[@DreadKyller]

Maybe instead of just a random number choosing the split tag, it could be that if the item stays in longer than a certain amount of time it becomes split, so if the output conveyer is backed up or not moving efficiently, the wood will stay in the dry kiln too long and split. There could still be some slight chance of splitting randomly in addition, but this may add some pressure to make sure the belts are properly balanced.

[@SoundlessMusic]

upping this idea!

[@captain61games49]

Doae relying up it even more?

[@vidal9747]

It's so cool when a developer makes a game with the community.

[@SpaghettiBrainX]

that would be a nice feature that encourages efficiency! i like it

[@RZLZY]

Just an Idea: Have a wood quality system. Early game machines produce wood that will be less quality, therefore selling for less Amber. Late game machines increase the wood quality and the wood sells for more. This could be interesting for late game from people trying to find the maximum quality just like in Factorio find the most efficient ratio for products.

[@Flec2507]

You uploading made my Day. Love to see the progress this project has made

[@flower-fauna]

i dont know if an upgrade in the dryer should just remove the need for steam completly? I feel as if its nicer if for example i may use less steam in V2 and for V3 you have the option of just using electricity instead or something similar to that This way it would give more different gameplay option but wouldnt remove the planning "challenge" involved with needing the steam network to be connected to the dryers as well But i love how the game is coming along, such beautiful and amazing work!

[@Shucklefuck]

I second this. Upgrades that remove game mechanics always lose their charm quickly

[@lexruesink6195]

Maybe the third level of the kiln should actually require more steam/electricity, because it offers other advantages (it makes more money).

[@JohnnyThousand605]

+1 I thought it was a bit odd to remove the need for steam all together

[@Joshisepic2222]

And just yesterday I had come to see if there were any new devlogs since I last checked

[@FruitLoops_]

God, I love when you upload. Really. I love it. I have watched the playlist of devlogs at least 5 times now and I'm SO EXCITED to play this game! I'm not kidding when I say I wouldn't mind even a single bit getting Lumbermill for Christmas or for my birthday, really, give me Lumbermill and I don't need anything else. I hope you don't overstress yourself. This project is bloody amazing!

[@hippolippo]

You may not realize that you are doing this but by having almost all the game ui components and such added programmatically is basically a dream come true when it comes to modding the game so I thank you very much for doing it like this.

[@gamesforlyfe6198]

I think that your growth tree graph should have and little upward slope because of the tree farming that is going to happen, irl when you leave trees you get amazon rain forests so it should work on some way like that.

[@thegreengoblin5483]

One cool thing that you can add is diseases spreading rarely in the forest. They don't spread quickly so you can prevent them ruining the forest if you notice them from their beginning.

[@thyfilthypagan1425]

Idea: Instead of trees dying out, you could have older trees slow the growth rate of surrounding younger trees meaning at a certain point if there are too many trees in a certain area trees growth could halt. This could provide strategies for planting saplings to get the quickest growing rate while ideally still having the effect of stopping overgrowth. It could simulate that taller trees reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the smaller trees. Not sure of all the implications such a feature would have or if it has already been suggested was just a thought I had.

[@ethandolbear3834]

Cannot wait for this game's eventual release! Been watching for a long time now and will continue even after release, I've come to enjoy your style and videos to the point where even if you move on from lumbermill, I'll be sure to jump right on whatever is next!

[@Bruwnie_]

I don't know if it exists, but you should add a feature where different power sources change the environment around you, like coal makes less valuable wood, nuclear makes new mutant wood, and solar increases size

[@GamesBySaul]

Great video Ben! Seeing the tree life cycle really makes the game feel more alive, and is super satisfying to watch honestly!

[@Skeffles]

Great devlog. I love watching the forest growing. It feels alive!

[@madebyPure]

Just binged the whole devlog series for Lumbermill. Really inspiring stuff, thanks for making this!

[@usdm704]

i am loving the art style in this game. great work man.

[@stretch520]

Love this dev log! Your consistent work on the game is inspiring :)

[@justingolden21]

You make awesome progress every time man! Love following the journey. Keep putting your everything into this!

[@nichegames9590]

Jeez game dev is a lot of work. Looks great.

[@chance2480]

Another awesome video :) Love the persistency and forced high quality man it’s inspiring ❤️‍🔥

[@hatered6434]

Love these DevLogs!

[@magnemitestv3524]

Honestly, i cannot describe with words of how much of an inspiration you've been to me! You got me starten into programming!!

[@BWDev]

Great to hear, hope you enjoy programming!

[@brady1701]

Great progress and love what you are doing

[@Gahanun]

Always a pleasure seeing more progress on this project. 💚

[@spicylemonstudios1125]

The logs and kilns look amazing! Nice job😁

[@martinstrickler127]

New sprites look awesome! 👍

[@Simtar123]

Love this devlog and the way this game works and looks

[@rajakaz4075]

Waiting for this very much! I can see it is made with heart and soul! :)

[@bigbraintwo]

I love these dev logs

[@kairu_b]

Great progress!

[@srswildman]

please make new devlog

[@BWDev]

Working on it!

[@PatrikBergsten]

Good video. Always a treat to take a break from coding and chill out to a new video of yours

[@titanderp]

It's been a while since I watched, Nice to see the game is going well.

[@TitanLordofPizza]

looking great

[@durrium]

Just gotta say, the "energy building" is just so damn good. It clearly shows the electricity and what it does. Great UX 😁

[@spidertyler]

I forgot your channel existed, so glad this popped into my feed

[@michaellese3604]

Really great video!!

[@Sky-yd1us]

I love your content, you should add a dev tree, that produces dev logs, that would be funny, like a custom tree/materials

[@TheShelfman]

This is a fantastic devlog! This is soooo my kind of game😁

[@timcraftgaming8333]

nice one as always

[@zoomgaming4959]

Damn that game really evolved over time, it now looks pretty smooth and i cant wait to play it!🥳👍

[@driftling2395]

im SOOOOO hyped for this game

[@eboatwright_]

The game's lookin' great! :D

[@UnderfundedScientist]

I love this so much

[@seurg]

I think, animation for trees turning ancient is interesting to see next devlog. 🎄👍

[@MultiGamer292]

I so can't wait to play this game

[@martindobrev7263]

you can remove population cap hack, if you spawn/init trees with random age (uniformly distributed).

[@SuperDutchrutter]

Love the dev logs! 🪵 🪵 glad you’re keeping this project going. The living forest is really neat. 🙌

[@RobertoTonberry]

I know nothing about code but this I really enjoyed and made sense!!

[@_loxymore_]

KZbin WTF, IT RECOMMENDED ME THE VIDEO AND GAVE THE NOTIFICATION 17 HOURS AFTER THE RELEASE.

[@philippk7554]

I really think the conveyors look better with the stilts, maybe you could just make them narrower so they still fit into their tile.

[@BWDev]

I agree, but it’s a very minor change that people will get used to quickly - unfortunately I need to make these compromises sometimes to solve problems that can’t be solved otherwise. Narrowing the belts would severely restrict the resolution I can use for item sprites, which is critical for item recognition, while the stilts are purely aesthetic… So they need to go sadly

[@AlexFigar]

Damn, this has come a long way now

[@RavenclawNimbus]

Yay! New video!

[@energeticmoon0217]

Very cool

[@stonic6396]

be honest, that intro was clean with all that trees... really smart, really smart... now time to steal that idea ;D

[@nicknick-dev]

Stealing an idea means that you are always many steps behind

[@krismg_21]

Wow that was fast

[@mrragge7986]

Under fully grown trees there should be roots underground that block you from building pipes and stuff there Edit: maybe you could kill the tree to remove the roots

[@harrykitchener5597]

Just thinking that a hard mode set during a recession would be a cool idea. Maybe a bit depressing but idk. The game looks pretty close to completion now! Its been awesome to watch it grow from a cool concept to a great looking game

[@JustANoob1]

in the future add logic that can read item properties and change the direction of conveyor's and other stuff like that.

[@Pope_]

You should make it so that clicking on a converyer belt will show you the average cost of items on it/amount of items on it and other stats about it.

[@Jaryt]

you should add a shader clip mask that passes the trees when you're hovering over (or maybe even if the mouse is in proximity) any of the components :)

[@CumuloWinter]

Hey! when getting a random value between 0f and 1f, instead of Random.Range, try Random.value! Hope it helps

[@BWDev]

Oh cool! Didn’t know that was a thing, thanks 👍

[@poderpsittacus465]

It would be so cool if the prices for lumber, would be tied to the real world prices of lumber. I know it would be hard to implement. But imagine reading about a sudden boom of beech in the newspaper, then you can go in to your game and sell of the beech stock you have keeped for a good point to sell. This would lead to infinite replayability😂

[@FlorianDeimer]

Have you planned difficulty options for the game? As I saw the saplings I had to think about the real life age of trees. Maybe in a harder difficulty you have to plan more carefully, because the trees are growing like in real life much slower and you have a higher chance of deforesting your island. Or an option to activate like climate change type of stuff which can hurt your trees (storms, bugs, longer summers...) That would at least be very current to the 21. century

[@BWDev]

Yep difficulty settings are planned!

[@vidal9747]

@@BWDev I would love to see climate change events in the game! It would be very interesting. At least better than seeing it in real life...

[@doursen]

This feels so Chris Sawyer. I love it. does this have a scenario creator?

[@sanderalberts897]

it would be cool to counteract the split log and other uncertanty's with a "inspector" wich checks logs on their property's and then give it a tag wich can be used by a splitting conveyor to go in a different direction this also allows for transfering multiple items on 1 belt

[@falxie_]

There probably should be some sort of death animation for trees

[@rzrx1337]

nice

[@MultiGamer292]

It it definitely outside the scope of this game but it would be great to have a (part of) the game where u can use the wood to build furniture etc

[@MultiGamer292]

Okay I just clicked on the next video xD I mean hand crafting not automatically. But this is really cool!

[@frankmeyers5753]

I don't know if you've ever played Lumber Tycoon 2 before on roblox, but I'm getting that kind of vibe.. a little bit and I would love to see this game take that approach. I think it would make this game even more unique if you added special kinds of trees/axes/items with some sort of rarity or something special like that just so that the game has a little more flexibility and creativity when it comes to things to do, and make the game last a lot longer. Just a thought. Looking pretty good though. Interested to see where you go with this. Maybe make some trees that just rarely randomly grow anywhere on the map or just hard to get to or you know.. something like that I think would make me even more interested.

[@mrfrog0913]

I can't belive I almost forgot about Lumbermill

[@xdn_yt]

This is more artistic than useful request but maybe you could create different sprites for the same tree logs so they're not all facing the same direction and add some realistic yo the game

[@t4g2s]

Hi great video, I loved it !, but I think you looked from wrong perspective at the problem of having steep initial rise and then fall. As you can see, later in graph the things got lot better and there was found equilibrium. What you could do is to do little statistics in the equilibrium state of forest and then generate first trees with given probability system.

[@brodykladis8125]

1.2k likes and 3 dislikes at just 8k views, your vids are great, we look forward to every dev log

[@lukas6538]

Have you thought about adding day and night cycle, weather, like clouded days so that players don't only rely only on solar power, same for low tides etc.

[@ReikoTennosaar]

Subbed

[@travispettry3025]

When wood "splits" its actually called checking. You should mark the wood as checked.

[@benman9242]

I think it would be nice if lumberjacks went over to plant the saplings after you indicate where you want to place them. You could even have a separate NPC type called the botanist or something like that.

[@BWDev]

I’m considering this as part of the Arborists’ job 🤔

[@thypandrew3913]

Hey i know your still working on the fundamentals but you should consider adding logic gates in some aesthetic for detailed player manipulation of the conveyor belt

[@cmrcmr9112]

Make it so as they come out of the kiln more can go in immediately instead if waiting till they all come out

[@RobLang]

Huge amount of detail, do you have a sense of a release date and marketing plan?

[@khiemgom]

Do u want to stick to real life with real machine and stuff or its just partially realistic and u get creative with more machines?

[@RoskGamer]

what about mechanics that make you chose whether to cut the trees or not.... maybe collecting sap .... or bees, and the quality of the honey is determined by the mix of trees they pollinate

[@ITR]

Which font are you using for the hover info windows?

[@jjslayer3249]

When do you expect to release the game? Looks so much fun

[@Jilted84]

I hope this game is free it looks very fun and i would love to play it

[@GoldenEvolution]

I don't know how you are currently taking care of layer order position between trees and such to make sure trees in the back really are visualised like they are in the back. But considering you've had problems with items on the conveyor belt not appearing behind the trees as they are supposed to be, have you tried sorting the position on the Y-axis? This is where objects with a higher Y position appear behind an object with a lower Y position. I'm not sure if this is what you are using currently for the trees etc. but for me this works flawlessly if you set the pivot points right

[@BWDev]

Hi, yes this is how it is handled at the lowest level - and it works in most cases. In more complex cases, such as with items stacked on top of others and diagonal movement, Y position isn’t reliable any more. For example, an item moving along a conveyor belt may have a higher Y position than the conveyor it is meant to be rendered on top of as it enters the conveyor, and would therefore be rendered behind it. If that item needs to be sandwiched between two layers of a building, all three parts might have the same Y position and the same issue happens. Sorting groups help to a certain extent, but still can’t solve the problem of diagonal movement. I didn’t go into every part of the technique, just a simple version of the main solution here. Might write up a technical blog post about it though 🤔

[@knniff5294]

Why not give only logs the split-property if the output conveyor was blocked for too long and thus they were forced to be to long in the kiln. This would cut back on randomness and would be something the player has to manage.

[@knniff5294]

Or maybe combine the two: Reward players who never have a backlog with 0% split chance and increase the chance the longer the kiln can't output.

[@JonkusBonkus133]

I feel like you need a second grid for trees so that they can look offset from one another and not so organised in an obvious grid

[@JonkusBonkus133]

Or maybe make them sit on tiles in a few different ways and not just centred

[@bowler28]

5:21 I thought he said: "A debug log..." like Debug.Log() and not "a debarked log...". Funny how brains work

[@RandomProduct]

"Turns out I'd used ints instead of floats" is a classic Random.Range mistake that I run into /constantly/

[@puzzlick7088]

Do you ever plan on adding termites or something similar that can have a chance of killing trees making the player need to take action against it? I think it would be an interesting idea, though I would think is something either that can be disabled or if there is a difficulty option only happen in higher difficulties.

[@danyloboy1477]

What if you sometimes go live on twitch so that people who really want to know how the game has been going and you can see it.

[@theobrock4500]

I'm sure you're aware, but wood is dried after it has been sawn. Drying a log is not really possible in any reasonable amount of time. I know this might not work with the systems you currently have in place, but I thought it's worth saying. It also might be interesting to be able to saw lumber in different ways: quarter vs. through and through. Different amounts of waste, with a higher price on quarter + rift sawn. Love the game, but I haven't been able to keep up with devlogs. So if anything I said is contradictory, sorry!

[@BWDev]

Yeah I’m planning on making it only possible to dry sawn timber, rather than logs. Pretty simple to implement, just hadn’t done it in time for this video 👍 Also got plans for an advanced saw that allows for different sawing patterns to be chosen 🙂

[@DrCrazyEvil]

Don't forget sakura trees! :)

[@zachb1706]

I feel like solar power is counter intuitive to the game design. As you progress, your systems should get bigger and more complicated. Solar is the opposite, essentially removing the power mechanic rather than making it more complex

[@BWDev]

Solar power is a late game system you need to unlock. Convenience can be nice later on when you’ve got lots of other systems to manage 🙂

[@Deccoyi]

1:36 what is that extension that shows parameter names (like coordinate: speed etc.) called?

[@BWDev]

It’s JetBrains’ Rider IDE - not an extension 🙂

[@netcore10]

I was thinking about sprites and how you made one type of log, couldn't you reuse sprites if you made them greyscale and dchanged the colour dynamically depending on what type of log it is?

[@BWDev]

I could technically do this, but writing a shader and then manually setting up all the colours would probably end up being just as much work as drawing each design manually - and I’d have less control over visual differences that make log types more recognisable - like bark texture and wood grain

[@Tyrone-Ward]

Have you seen Timberborn?